Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies.

• Author: Ekbladh, David
• Position: Review

Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies

David Nye (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) 331 pp.

David Nye has carved out a place for himself in academic circles with his considerable work on the social implications of technologies. His books Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (1990) and American Technological Sublime (1994) stand squarely with other recent works on the history of science and technology that seek to understand machines as cogs in a larger social system rather than independent historical forces. Nye's latest work, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, continues this theme. Focusing on the question of how the United States became the world's largest consumer of energy, Nye explains the succession of energy systems that have existed in the country and how they have affected and been impacted by the culture they serve.

While Nye's title implies a focus on energy, this is not a book purely devoted to the intricacies of the operation of water-powered mills, electricity grids and the internal combustion engine. Nye sees his book as a "reconceptualization" of Lewis Mumford's opus, Technics and Civilization (1934). Where Mumford's work covers one thousand years and explains the rise of the machine as a central force in Western civilization, Nye focuses entirely on the United States and limits himself to a history of the 400 years since the arrival of European settlers. Nevertheless, the reference to Mumford reveals that this book is about the larger society and not just how electrical power is created and distributed.

Nye traces the rise and eventual decline of several large energy systems that have dominated American life. He outlines the "energies of conquest"--the employment of human and animal muscle, wind and small-scale water power--that cleared the way for European settlement of the United States and the predominantly agrarian society that came with it. As the United States began to industrialize in the first decades of the 19th century, water power began to supplant those energies as an industrial tool. The middle of that century brought the rapid expansion of steam power in the form of steamboats, railroads and factory machinery. By the end of the century, electricity was transforming communication, the urban landscape and transportation. The development of the internal combustion engine, and the subsequent use of automobiles, tractors and trucks, brought with it significant...